How I Got Started In Entrepreneurship

For someone to get into entrepreneurship is pretty easy. It’s just a matter of choice. But, in order for someone to stay an entrepreneur, it takes courage and a whole bunch of persistence.

Growing up I never knew the word entrepreneur, never used it, never heard of it. Thinking back, the closest thing I knew relative to entrepreneurship is a business person. I’d never exercise the idea of becoming a business person as a child or a teen.

Being that my parents were working class people, business was never spoken in my family. I was raised being told to go to school, get good grades, go to college, and get a good paying job. And that’s what I strove to do.

I never had any ambition to be in business. In fact, to me business had a negative connotation. I used to think business people were boring people in suits that stayed in offices and tried to sell and manipulate people into spending money in their businesses – a correlation with salespeople, but hey that’s what I knew and thought of business people.

I also was, and still, am a shy, quiet, introverted, a little anti-social, person who didn’t like to hold conversations with strangers. So, being a business person was way far down on my list of career choices for me. I, instead leaned more towards being an artist, scientist, and an engineer because I didn’t have to deal with much people.

It was when I was in high school that any type of business thoughts delved into my mind.

I acquired the passion for cooking in a food science class that I took as an elective. I followed up with food services classes and fell in love with cooking. I found my, then, career path. My ambition was to become a chef and one day open up my own restaurant.

I loved it. I loved working in a restaurant as a cook and, as I’ve been told, a pretty good one at that. I was a top student in my culinary classes in high school and college. I entered and won a few cooking competitions. I studied, read, and watched cooking shows to improve my cooking skills. I took initiative to learn everything and anything I could from fellow classmates, teachers, other cooks, and chefs. I poured questions out that it almost became a nagging irritation. I could’t help it, it was my passion.

Until four years later in 2008, I lost every bit of passion for cooking. I hated it with anxiety to reinforce my dispassion for it.

It usually takes a pretty disastrous or tragic event in order for people to change.

Me losing the passion for cooking says a lot and prefaces the tragedy that I came across. It took a lot out of me slipping me into slight depression.

But it is also one of the best things ever to have happened to me (so far). I have to say it was a life changing series of events that led me to become the entrepreneur I am today.

Check back here to find out how.